Stephen Shore | Uncommon Places: Vintage Prints

New York

Side Gallery

25 January — 31 March 2018

Press Release

Edwynn Houk Gallery is pleased to present Stephen Shore | Uncommon Places: Vintage Prints, an exhibition of vintage works from the artist’s landmark series, Uncommon Places. The exhibition will be on view at the gallery’s New York location from 25 January to 1 March 2018.

Stephen Shore (American, b. 1947) is a pioneer of color and vernacular photography. Alongside a small number of his contemporaries, such as William Eggleston and Joel Sternfeld, Shore helped launch the widespread recognition and appreciation of color photography as art. This movement, which became known as New American Color Photography, and Shore’s work in particular, has influenced a generation of artists, including Andreas Gursky, Thomas Struth, and other members of the Düsseldorf School of Photography.

First published as a monograph in 1982, the images in Uncommon Places articulate a vision of the United States unlike any preceding artistic statement. Taken over the course of several road trips across North America between 1973 and 1979, the images present both the artist’s personal journey and a study of archetypal American life in the midst of cultural change. Using a large-format camera for the first time, Shore elevates ordinary scenes such as hotels, side streets, and parking lots to expertly composed tableaux saturated with detail.

This exhibition is a rare presentation of vintage photographs printed at the time of their creation. Each print conveys an authentic atmosphere of the 1970s, not only through Shore’s chosen imagery, but also through the print’s object and color qualities. The palette, scale, and preservation of the original paper embody the artist’s original vision. Shore’s first solo exhibition at the Museum of Modern Art, New York in 1976, as well as his current retrospective at the museum, on view through May 2018, both include several works from Uncommon Places exhibited in this same format.

Born and raised in New York City, Stephen Shore learned about and practiced photography from a young age. When he was 14 years old, Edward Steichen acquired his prints for the collection of the Museum of Modern Art, New York. Shortly thereafter, Shore became the first living photographer since Alfred Stieglitz to receive a solo exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. More than 25 books have been published of his photographs, including Uncommon Places: The Complete Works (2004); American Surfaces (1999); and Stephen Shore (2017), published by the Museum of Modern Art, New York to accompany the artist’s major retrospective. His work has been the subject of solo exhibitions at the Art Institute of Chicago, IL; International Center of Photography, NY; Kunsthalle Düsseldorf; and the Armand Hammer Museum of Art, CA. Work by the artist is held in major international institutional collections, including the Metropolitan Museum of Art, NY; Whitney Museum of American Art, NY; Library of Congress, Washington, D.C.; San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, CA; and the Victoria & Albert Museum, London. The artist lives in Tivoli, New York.